Trip Report: Zootopia

3/17/17 (Introduction)

Today is our last meeting in school for the Zootopia trip, and I have been looking forward to it since being selected to go on it. I think it's neat that we now have transuniversal flights to other worlds, allowing them into ours. They still have to go through universal customs of course, but I think it's so cool, because without it, our Zootopia trip would be impossible.

I've done research on Zootopia. Geographically, over in that world, it's located where New York is in our world. They have a United States just like us, including all fifty states. Zootopia, however, is it's own U.S. province, not being part of any state. It is situated on Zootopia Island, with suburbs in Pennsylvania and New York surrounding it.

I have set Google Maps to their universe so I could explore Zootopia. I've poked around on street view and I quickly learned that animals are much more advanced in roads and highways than in our world. Zootopia has such an immense highway system that is bigger even than Dallas', and Dallas' system is huge!

Zootopia also has no shortage of skyscrapers. It's just like Hong Kong, except a little more colorful. It's funny, because here, most animals are colorblind, but there, they see a lot more colors than we do.

Enough with the research. I went into the class room and the two Geography teachers at my high school will be our chaperones for the trip on Spring Break, Mr. Parker and Mrs. Davidson. I sat down and joined the other nine juniors who were going on the trip.

Mr. Parker went over a few last minute tips on the agenda that we need to know. We need to be at Terminal D at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport at 9:00 AM to board our flight, American Airlines Flight 309, for Zootopia, which will be a twelve hour flight at supersonic speed. Like all transuniversal flights, the aircraft will fly on a tangent leaving earth, and just like the car in Back to the Future, will zip from our world to theirs, like poof. 

We filled out ballets in advance requesting what animals we would transform into. I requested a black bear, because they're my favorite animal. I wondered what it would be like to be an animal, and now I got to find out!

Mrs. Davidson started talking about how we will use the Zootopia Metro to get around everywhere we needed to go. Zootopia's system is crazy because they have 29 lines spreading out and tangling with each other throughout the city, plus a high-speed maglev train that we will use to get from the airport to downtown where our hotel is.

We are staying at the Grand Hyatt hotel, near the Watering Hole. It's the swirly tentacle-like building if you look at the skyline, and it's eighty stories tall. We got the full agenda, which included seeing the famous Zootopia night markets, shopping centers, as well as Zootopia Pier and Zootopia Harbor, and a few museums, including the Natural History Museum.

Our meals will mainly be rushed, and it will be interesting not having meat over there, but bugs. We were told, though, that once we turned into our animal selves, we might be surprised at how tasty the food is over there. The have ice cream from coconut milk! There's also a very popular fast food chain over there called Bugburga, which is like their version of McDonald's except it's bug burgers.

We learned about how there are only two races among their society: predators and prey. Thousands of years ago over there, predators used to eat prey, but over time they evolved, and now they are fully civilized, at least they officially marked their civility with the end of their Civil War at the Watering Hole in 1865. I did learn that, still, in their North Korea, predators have to wear collars, and they also did in China for a while until the early 70s.

Other than all those differences, and many other strange ones, they are just like us in terms of the way they live. Except when we go to a Walmart over there, they will have a much bigger variety of products for different species that live there. Still, I am looking very forward to this trip and I cannot wait to wake up tomorrow morning, ready for the trip to start.